Note to smart board users

Currently the latest version of the smart board software is version 9.5. This particular version gives access to a range of additional tools and resources as opposed to its predecessor, version 8.

Popular teaching tools & software on the following subjects have proved to be very popular amongst kids & teachers alike.

Shape, Space and Angles

100 / Table square activities

Number sequences and patterns

Graphs

Time

Skills practice programs, games and puzzles

For more expert assistance please visit smartboard and interactive whiteboard ware house.

Cool Interactive Electronics

Electronics are always cool but it becomes both cool and hot at the same time if providing fun and learning. Here is the link to online shop of such interactive whiteboards.

The evolution of blackboards

The first blackboard used in a school was in Philadelphia in 1809. Early blackboards were made from pine lumber and covered with a mixture of egg white and carbon from charred potatoes. Teachers and students wrote with chunks of chalk and erased with cloth rags!

We have come a long way since and have been blessed with new and useful technologies that help make our learning experience an engaging one, where more time is spent on learning & less on the technicalities of maintaining a smooth learning environment, in other words, zero downtime.

Like most things invented in 1809, the blackboard is out of fashion. Funny thing is that it was very much in fashion 15-20 years ago. The past two decades have seen the teachers medium of interacting with students evolve from being an 8 x 4 foot black object glued to the wall to a clean white screen, no more than an inch and half thick. Classrooms are no longer covered in chalk dust, erasing chalk covered boards for the teacher is out of fashion and faking asthma to get out of it is no longer necessary. Students are finally safe from the piercing shrill crystallized chalk makes when coming in contact with the blackboard. The introduction of this new technology revitalized class teaching with the traditional blackboard and replaced it with a new focal point. However, the whiteboards today aren’t your average ‘oh watch me write and erase with such ease’ whiteboards, but are actually smart boards. Yes, they’re intelligent. They’re interactive, hit them and they hit back – metaphorically speaking of course.

Over the past few years the smart board has proved to be a valuable learning tool, it is, as a colleague of mine so eloquently put, ‘a force to be reckoned with’. With the help of the interactive whiteboard your average instructor is transformed into a master of the arts; science, history, geography, not to mention story telling. For the duration of the class the instructor is a wizard, a wizard wielding a wand and making sense of the pictures, landscapes and text the smart board magically projects onto the screen.

How does this work you ask? A computer image is projected onto the smart board screen surface where teachers simply touch to access and control any computer program. When a pen is selected from the ‘smart’ pen tray, Instructors are able to write over the top of the projected images of applications, pictures, stories etc and highlight information with electronic ink using the pen or their finger. Annotations can be edited, saved and printed for distribution to students – It’s as simple as that!

Teaching elementary school using a smart board is probably the most fun an instructor can have. One can use educational software or games. For instance, if you have Storybook Weaver on your computer (a software especially designed for interactive smart boards) all you have to do is start it up and wait for the image to display on your smart board after which you can then group write a story, let students come up and pick the background and pictures, add text along the way, the possibilities are endless! You can also teach basic word processing and other skills using Microsoft Office taking full advantage of the interactivity of your smart board.

The smart board has facilitated the use of distance learning in high-schools and colleges and has proved extremely helpful amongst students with limited motor skills. It’s easy interfacing with other peripherals such as computers, projectors, & hand-held pc’s has enabled the smart board to overcome compatibility issues and in turn it has become a house hold name.
The smart board is an excellent tool for the constructivist educator and most importantly it’s a kid magnet! The smart board is an excellent tool for the constructivist educator and most importantly it’s a kid magnet!

How Interactive whiteboards work?

An interactive whiteboard solution typically consists of four components:

• A computer, PC/Laptop etc
• A projector
• A display panel
• An appropriate software

The computer is connected to the projector and electronic whiteboard.  The projector displays the computer screen image onto the electronic board. Action on the surface of the display panel is communicated with the computer over a cable or wireless connection and interpreted via the installed software.  Display panels can be either front or back projection, i.e. the projector can be placed either in front of board or at the rear.

Additional components and accessories are available for some systems including hand held key pads for collecting individual responses and interactive white board tablets: in fact a small personal version of the larger board.

Some systems employ plasma screens instead of a projector, but they are very expensive and not considered further here.

There are three different kinds of interactive whiteboards technology:

Touch-sensitive

These electronic whiteboards have a soft flexible surface like vinyl, consisting of two pieces of resistive layers with a small gap between them to produce a touch-sensitive membrane. They can be drawn on using fingers or a special stylus that can represent pens of different colors via software selection. Movement is tracked by detecting the pressure of the stylus object on the surface.  The coordinates on the panel correspond to the area on the corresponding connected computer’s monitor.

 

Electro-Magnetic

 

These electronic whiteboards are similar to traditional whiteboards in that they have a hard surface and can be drawn on with normal pens. To work interactively they require special digitized pen, battery driven pens, that emit a small magnetic field that is detected either by the frame of the whiteboard. The whiteboard panel is digitized by a grid of fine wires embedded beneath the surface of the board. The signal from the digital pen also communicates location to the commuter even when it is at a distance from the actual surface of the digitized grid. This is the z-axis or the proximity signal. In the case of electromagnetic signal, the precision of input is controlled by the dispersion or width of the signal emitted from the electronic pen, and the density of the lines in the underlying digitized grid.

 

Laser sensor

These interactive whiteboards have a hard writing surface with infrared laser sensors mounted in the top corners of the board that detect pen movement. To work interactively they require special felt pens, each of which has a uniquely encoded reflective collar that the lasers use to identify its color and position.

Teaching interactively with electronic whiteboards, Smart boards

A Smart board is a very useful presentational device. It can be used to replace virtually every other class resource, traditional and modern: a blackboard, a flip chart, an OHP, maps, pictures, number lines, books, calculators and cassette and video players for example. At a touch the lecturer has access to a bank of resources that would previously have taken years to accumulate and a vast cupboard to store them in!
But the Smart board has the potential to do much more – to go beyond display, providing a tool for interactive teaching and learning. Interactive teaching involves the use of strategies that stimulate feedback from students. This is not just of benefit to the lecturer. Students learn much more effectively when they are active agents in their own learning, when they make their thinking explicit by words or actions, when they take ownership of ideas and information. Also, some learners will benefit from seeing other students demonstrate and explain their thinking and model how they arrive at their solutions.
The Smart board is an even more powerful stimulus to interactivity because:
• Everyone can write on it and changes can be saved – this gives shared ownership
• It has high visual impact – creating a theatrical effect in the class
• It facilitates better group control/management – the lecturer is up front facing the group
• It makes a wide range of resources instantly available
• Presentations etc can be annotated – by lecturer and students
• It engages students – gets them involved in class activity & by encouraging participation (An interactive classroom is an ideal learning environment)
• It facilitates concept mapping & distance learning – items can be moved around the screen & off-site classes may be held over school/college networks & the internet.
• It supports discussion (on the topic) and peer learning
• Lecturers and students enjoy using it.
It is not always necessary for students to interact physically with the smart board – the lecturer can be a mediator. Sometimes it is okay for the lecturer to hold the pen to model a particular skill or concept but more often than not the students should be directing what is happening on the screen. Other applications lend themselves to student use of the smart boards and there can be no doubt that students enjoy working in this way.